“I have a receipt for the tires,” I said.

The cop just stared at me. He was probably thinking about how, when someone decides to embark upon a life of crime, he should be at least the slightest bit prepared.

We were having what I felt was an amicable conversation in the parking lot of a Safeway grocery store sometime in the evening of a month in the summer of 1995. It was warm out, and I was about to get all kinds of arrested.

He wasn’t interested in the receipt. What he wanted was the vehicle’s registration, as well as proof of insurance. In Oregon, it is an offense against all that is good in the land to drive without proof of insurance. Ours was one of the first states of the Union to impose the death penalty on people who get caught driving without it. Then, after being executed, the offender is required to fill out an SR-22 form as further punishment. I don’t recall what exactly an SR-22 form is, but forms are never pleasant, and I don’t expect the SR-22 to violate this rule.

I put the receipt for my tires back in the glove compartment, feeling that it had not improved my relationship with the fuzz in the way I had hoped. I was somewhat young at the time, and didn’t fully understand the difference between registrations, proofs of insurance, and receipts for tires. They all jumbled together in my head as perfectly sufficient documentation for purposes that were more or less interchangeable.

On this occasion, though, things were different. Just before asking for my registration and proof of insurance, the police officer mentioned that I was about to get in a bit of trouble for having violated about twelve different traffic laws. He had been following me for several miles and had noted that I didn’t have the respect for traffic control devices, speed limits, sides of the road, right of way, private property, or gravity that was expected of someone who had been given the privilege of driving on Oregon streets.

He knew all of this, but still greeted me in the way all traffic police had before him and have since: “Son, do you have any idea why I pulled you over?”

They do this because they suspect that they might have missed something while following you, and that, by asking such a question, you might accidentally reveal further crimes for which you should be duly punished. For example, he may have expected to catch me off guard and get a saucy reply like, “Oh, yes, sir. I think I know why you pulled me over: my trunk is full of cocaine. It must be leaking out, and you saw it. That’s the most likely reason. Either that or it’s the guns I have sewn into the upholstery for transport into Canada. Yeah. I’m an arms smuggler. I smuggle arms into Canada. And I don’t mean, like, human arms, you know? I could do that, too, I guess, but I mean guns and stuff. The cocaine is just for me, although I sometimes share it with the underage hookers I pick up along the way. I like to snort cocaine while I run guns and have sex with minors. It keeps me awake and helps motivate me when I’ve got a bad case of the Mondays.”

I didn’t say that, though, because I have an IQ greater than my shoe size. That’s just an example of what the cop wanted to hear, ‘cause he probably could have retired after bringing me in.

What I actually said was, “Is it because my left headlight is out again? Dang. I’ve been meaning to get that fixed.”

He shook his head, and that’s when he listed my offenses, just before asking for the documentation that I mentioned a few paragraphs back.

For this cop, I was manna from Heaven. I knew at the time, having been pulled over just a few days prior, that the chief of police in 1995 had just requested of his officers that they increase the awarding of traffic tickets by 20%. My crimes against the State of Oregon would more than suffice to fill the gap. To this day, though, I question the intelligence of the chief’s request, given that a 20% increase in traffic tickets really ought to be accompanied by a 20% increase in traffic violations, but now is not the time for philosophy. Let us continue with the tale which, I shall tell you now my dear friends, eventually leads to a charming ending.

The only defense I had, after having played the tire receipt card, was to beg the officer to follow me to my father’s house, where I was living. It was only a half mile away, and I promised him that I wouldn’t make any foolish attempts to elude him on the way. To my surprise, he reluctantly agreed. The point of the journey was to show him the registration and proof of insurance which I knew was at the house. Or at least which I believed was at the house. Or maybe “suspected” might be a better word.

Hoped?

Yes. That’s the one. That fits.

The registration and proof of insurance which I hoped was at the house.

At the very least, it would have reduced my crimes from a dozen to a mere ten, which would have made the court case much less difficult and time consuming.

And so we went. And I made good on my promise, being a man of honor (when it suited me) and his word (when it was convenient).

We arrived at my father’s house a few minutes later and ascended the stairs to the front door, which I kicked in on account of our not having had a doorknob on it (what I mean to say is that kicking the door open was the easiest way to operate it – I wasn’t showing off for the cop).

We went inside. It was a work night, which meant that my father was relaxing in front of the television. I could hear him off in another room, laughing at some sitcom or another. He must have heard me come in because he called out, “Hey, Rory – is that you?”

It was customary to ask who was entering the house. Although it was only the two of us living there, not having a doorknob meant that anyone capable of applying sufficient pressure to the door to open it could simply walk in whenever the fancy took him. Should there have been no response, or had I said, “No, it is not Rory,” then my father would have come out to see just what in the fiddeldysticks was going on. But, since it was me, he continued to enjoy his sitcom.

“Hey, dad,” I called back, “I have someone out here who I’d like you to meet. We sort of need your help to find some documents.”

There was a pause followed by “Just a minute…” as though spoken by a baritone June Cleaver.

And then my father emerged. He hadn’t had a haircut in a while, and his hair was quite impressively positioned in a crown of white man afro. That was the first thing I noticed, considering for a moment suggesting that he get a haircut, but the cop was probably more interested in the rather large tie-dyed mu-mu my father was wearing.

I wasn’t particularly fond of that particular mu-mu on him, although I thought it complimented his hair in a way that made him look like a large, comforting motherly type. At six feet and two inches in height with a beer gut that made it look like he could go into labor at any time, my father didn’t have the best body for a mu-mu, but what he wore was his business. If he felt comfortable wearing a dress while eating popcorn and watching Seinfeld, then more power to him. Such is a man’s right in his domain.

Strange fashion sense aside, my father is actually an incredibly intelligent man, and he quickly assessed the situation. He knew that, when junior came home with a cop while asking for certain articles of documentation, something needed to be done to prevent junior from getting into (more) trouble.

The cop was simply astounded. At this point, being confronted with my father in such a state, he was probably wishing that he had simply given me a stern lecture in the Safeway parking lot on the dangers of driving while being a complete asshole, but he was stuck. Until the documents were found, he was our prisoner. For the time being, and this is totally fodder for an action movie starring Bruce Willis, the arrester had become the arrested. Every minute the documents remained lost was another minute he would have to stand and be witness to the unholy offense to fashion that was my father in a tie-dyed mu-mu.

“Over here, officer,” said my father, who was being as polite as one might expect of a man in such apparel. Following him, we all moved into the kitchen, which put us into rather close quarters. The lighting was better in there, too, so the cop had the chance to observe my father’s figure in full. In fact, he really had no choice, as my father was the loudest, largest thing in the room, both in voice and dress.

Dad brushed a few cats off the counter, and the cats looked unhappy for a moment before coughing up hairballs at the cop’s boots. There’s something to be said for the impressive degree of perception with which cats can detect evil. To create an Evil Detector, one need only borrow a cat, tie it to a stick, aim it at the suspected article of evil, and pay attention to the cat’s expressions. If the cat looks to be in discomfort, it’s probably just from being tied to a stick, but if the cat ejects hairballs at your target, then evil is assured.

Ah, cats.

But, glorious though they may be, let them not delay our story any longer!

The countertop, now free of the feline persuasion of vermin, was the perfect surface upon which to create Document Search Headquarters (that is, it would have been perfect had it not been covered in a mixture of mold and cat urine, but this was as good as things were going to get at the time). As the cop stood and looked very uncomfortable, even vulnerable (while wearing a Kevlar vest, no less), my father wasted no time reaching into random drawers and producing stacks of yellowed paper and placing them onto the counter.

There were letters from family members, photographs of ashtrays (don’t ask), unpaid bills from the 70’s, and other assorted bits of dead tree that had been sitting in the Blyth Document Purgatorium for anywhere from days to years. And my father placed them into stacks. And the stacks were many. And the cats were still coughing up hairballs at the cop.

Dad began with the stack of documents nearest himself, and, with the utmost care, as though performing neurosurgery on the Pope, lifted the corner of each piece of paper and meticulously studied its contents until he felt justified in moving on to the next. After several minutes, he had managed to cover nearly 20% of the documents in the first stack without producing anything more legally relevant than a naughty photograph stuck to an unpaid bill for the cable television (the cable television which we no longer had, by the by, because of the unpaid bill).

That’s when reality hit the cop square in the face. He was standing in a kitchen, flanked by a young effeminate boy-criminal, the boy’s father who was dressed in a slightly non-traditional fashion, while cats threw-up on his boots. He resigned himself to a loss and said, quite simply, “Look. I’m gonna go. So, uh. Just don’t do it again, OK?”

My suspicion is that he probably walked outside our house, tossed his badge to the ground, and left the law-enforcement profession forever. Maybe he became an accountant. Or joined a commune. Or just went crazy. I don’t know. You never know. It’s a tough life, being a cop and having to deal with underage criminals and their transvestite fathers.

Anyway, I just wanted to write this up in honor of my father. Although I could never tell him this to his face, or at least haven’t yet learned how, I think he’s one of the most incredible, eccentric, and wonderful people to have ever walked on this planet, and I love the bastard to death. He’s a living mix between Oscar Wilde, Cyrano, Dali, and Boy George. I often refer to him as The Best Kept Secret in the World, and people who know him don’t disagree. The man is my hero.

Word to the pops.

Progeny to the left with his cross-dressing father to the right